Forerunner

• Published date: 01 September 2011
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716211403890
• Author: Jason Sokol
• Date: 01 September 2011

38 ANNALS, AAPSS, 637, September 2011

This article focuses on the political campaigns and career

of Edward Brooke—the first black senator elected by

popular vote and the only African American senator ever

to win reelection. Brooke stands as the pioneer of a

specific historical tradition: the history of black politi-

cians who have won white votes. This article positions

Brooke as the most important forerunner to Barack

Obama. Indeed, he anticipated many of the racial and

political currents that Obama has had to navigate. Yet

this article aims to do more than situate Barack Obama’s

ascent within the broader arc of American political his-

tory. It also explores Brooke’s campaigns and career in an

effort to offer a new perspective on the history of racial

politics in America’s northern states.

Keywords: African American history; American poli-

tics; Barack Obama; Edward Brooke;

Massachusetts

“I

never succumbed to the reality,” Edward

Brooke reflected some 40 years later. By

“the reality,” he meant the fierce opposition to

school integration and open housing that

existed in Massachusetts during the 1960s, riots

that exploded across urban America, the rising

Black Power movement, and an emergent white

backlash. “I never let that deter me” (Poussaint

2001). Instead, Brooke offered Massachusetts

voters an alternate reality—a place where race

was not a political object, where segregation

and racial violence existed on a separate plane

from the one on which candidates battled for a

seat in the United States Senate. “I was also

asking the voters to rise above that and vote

for me,” Brooke recalled. “Rise above that and

vote for me.”1

Forerunner:

The Campaigns

and Career of

Edward Brooke

By

JASON SOKOL

Jason Sokol is an assistant professor of history at the

University of New Hampshire. He is the auth or of

There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in

the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (Knopf 2006). An

American historian, he has taught at Harvard, Penn,

Cornell, and Berkeley. He is currently working on a book

titled The Northern Mystique: Race and Politics from

Boston to Brooklyn.

©Jason Sokol

DOI: 10.1177/0002716211403890